Reckoning with Society and Sutherland Springs

I waited a few days since the massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas to post any thoughts on what happened, because immediate thoughts tend not to be measured, and tend to be overly emotional. There was already enough of that happening before we knew the total number of the dead, so waiting was good.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, a common response from people was to offer "thoughts and prayers" and other heartfelt words in reaction to a heartless attack. For the first time, I started to notice people openly mocking "thoughts and prayers" and some were even using foul language to attack politicians who said such things. Many of the online assaults attacked and mocked religion, which was especially poignant given that the massacre took place inside a church and on a Sunday.

After Sunday, there are a lot of questions that continue to be worth asking each time a tragedy like this occurs, and Sunday brought those questions back to the forefront. They probably are not the questions you think need to be asked.

The cynic will ask "what will the thoughts and prayers do?" Well, there are many facets to that answer. We pray for the souls lost, especially to such senselessness. We pray for the families who lost a loved one. We pray for the injured. We pray for a community to stay strong and comfort each other. We pray for more heroes like the two men who confronted the gunman and then followed him to his end. We might even say a prayer thankful that this was not worse than it was, those injured could have been among the casualties after all. And had the killer not been challenged by the aforementioned two men, no one knows what his plan consisted of next.

Our society is ailing. We were ailing before this, we will ail for some time to come. How do we move forward? Are we always going to worry now that no place is safe, that no place is sacred?

Those people who know me know that almost every situation that I discuss always leads me to ask one of three questions: What are the root causes? What would Transformational Change look like? Where does this end? I am not often interested in small solutions.

A brief primer on these questions for perspective:

Root Causes - If we want to inquire as to why so many teen girls get pregnant, we start discussing the availability and affordability of contraceptive options. That is what I consider to be treating the symptoms. I suggest we look deeper. I want to know why teens are engaging in destructive behavior with life-altering consequences. Are too many families breaking apart, leaving single parents to raise children and circumstances lead them to engage in behavior better left to adults? Are parents that are raising children in these times too overmatched with technology and supervision issues? Is pop culture so out of control that teens think real life actually looks like what they see on so-called reality tv or on the Facebook or Twitter accounts of so-called stars?

Transformational Change - This is massive change; not change for the timid. This is the opposite of tinkering around the edges. Tinkering would be like using a teaspoon to scoop water off the deck of the Titanic (or the oft-used phrase of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic). Transformation would be like a school system offering that for each year a high school student graduates early, the school system will direct the money from those "earned" years into paying that many years of college or vocational school. So, graduate in 11 years, get a free year of higher education; graduate in 10 years, get two years of free higher education. I told you it was not for the timid. 

Think about the level of change that happens here. Think about the parental involvement that occurs when parents realize they are helping their children earn toward college/vocational credit. Think about the reduced class sizes once you get the kids that need to move on to the next level, out of the classroom, and allow teachers to focus on those who remain so that the instruction gets more personal, more focused. You see the point, and this post is not about education, so I will move on for now.

Where Does it End (also known as the slippery slope) - We like to help people that have served our country or community in great ways. We like to give these people tax breaks. For instance, perhaps a cap on or an elimination of property taxes for people who have done X, Y, or Z. Well, not long after one group gains this perk, others chime in and want caps or eliminations too. Are we saying that the group that got the cap or elimination is so much better than this other worthy group that we cannot even consider this other group for the same? So we go along. Well then, here comes the third group a while later... before we know it, no one is paying the tax and there is no revenue generation to fund programs. In Texas, for instance, our property taxes fund public education, so if everyone gets an exemption on property taxes, who or what is paying for education then? Public education is not getting cheaper, so it will need funding, there is no doubt about that. The need for education reform can be discussed another time, so I will again move on for now.

Now, back to the tragedy that took place this past Sunday.

Immediately after the news broke, opportunist politicians and many Leftist Hollyweird-types (like they don't have their own problems right now, problems that continue to get exposed daily) started chiming in with their usual calls for gun control and worse, more government "action," in whatever shape or form they can get it right now. Needless to say, Hollyweird does not have the answers. Just because Leo fictionally died in the freezing cold waters when Rose dispatched him from weighing down her floating wooden door, he thinks he is an expert on so-called global warming. It is not so for him, and not so for most of his fellow script readers.

To think another gun law would have stopped Sunday's massacre is to leave logic behind. It is also worth noting that certain gun laws or gun usage laws, would not have kept a determined Devin Kelley at home on Sunday, and in fact might have prevented the two men who confronted and stopped him from owning, driving with, or using the gun that was used to end the mayhem.

I will go a step further, to make a point. Imagine that we made all guns illegal. Imagine we made all baseball bats illegal. Imagine we made cars illegal (remember just last week in NYC eight people were killed by a terrorist with a car). Imagine we made axes, chainsaws, and knives illegal. Imagine we made metal or lead pipes illegal.

Utopia, right?

We have to reach deeper.

What are we doing about the mentally ill? We may (and I emphasize "may") keep the mentally ill from mass killing, simply by making everything illegal. Well, at that point the mentally ill are still mentally ill and they still need help. So what now? If the person goes out in the world without any weapons and instead chokes a person to death, well, we can hope choking a person to death is illegal...

The absurdity of all of this is to point out that laws have limits. We should make murder illegal! We should make theft illegal! We should make drug use illegal! To show we are serious about illegal drug use, we should fund a "war on drugs" and really go after the users and the sellers and the growers. Maybe we could even grow government in the process.

We have to reach deeper.

I will offer up one such example: Imagine this Sunday church killer. Imagine when he was dishonorably discharged from the military that a local group was contacted and made aware of him. Maybe this was a church, maybe this was a non-profit. Maybe this was somebody to have a casual conversation (or a series of conversations) with this disturbed soul and see if he would talk. People trained properly can identify buzzwords and traits, they know what to look for. At that point, these people know who to notify for further help and monitoring.

Now, this is an isolated incident. We know that Devin Kelley was a severely challenging case, beyond the help of any one single person. There is a case to be made that the type of "after-care" I am suggesting has its limits, but it also has the potential of recognizing those who really need more care than we realize, before they do the unthinkable.

Hollywood "actress" Sarah Silverman tweeted after Sunday's incident that we learn lessons from airplane crashes, and air travel gets increasingly safer as a result. That was a surprisingly coherent and reasonable assessment. Silverman then rode the train right into the ditch in a flaming ball of glory when she lamented that supposedly nothing happens following one mass shooting after another.

What I would suggest to Silverman and the other elites is that we learn even more pragmatic lessons of prevention. Instead of trying to prevent mass killings by demanding more gun laws, let us work toward helping the people who might fit the profile of the most likely of attackers. I would suggest we find solutions that do not cause further harm to people or further reduce freedom for people who did not do anything wrong. I would suggest that if Silverman put the kind of time into developing community-based solutions and involvement that she puts into advocating more gun controls laws, we might actually see the reduction in these tragedies that we all seek.

Mine is not strictly a freedom and liberty and minimal government argument. From that perspective though, there are a lot of tax breaks and loopholes in the tax code for a lot of things that I think could be and should be eliminated. I am more in favor of incentives and tax breaks for the creation of groups and organizations that seek to do right in our country. These are not always religious organizations or even churches, and they do not need to be. What works, is what works. If the religious approach works, then we should encourage it where it works. I have written in the past about a religious approach to drug addiction, alcoholism, and homelessness (here and here). The approach was unorthodox, but its positive results and number of changed lives is staggering. That approach may not work for everyone everywhere. But neighborhood healers can do work at the most minute levels of our society that no piece of federal legislation will ever accomplish.

Instead of showing up after a tragedy and demanding liberty-limiting change, let us try a little prevention which also will not limit our freedom and alienate our communities; done correctly we can strengthen both.

We have to reach deeper.

This is not a time to further empower those with some authority over us. Think of this as a time to find the solutions from within our communities, within our neighborhoods, within our families and most importantly, within ourselves.

So, which of my three questions is at work here? All of them.

We have to reach deeper. When we do this, we can address what ails us in a way that is worthy of America.

Neighborhood Healers

This column has been prepared as part of a reading supplement for the Republican Party of Texas convention in Ft. Worth.

By Artemio Muniz and Steve Parkhurst

Across America, many of our neighborhoods are crumbling, in need of renewal and all hope of achieving the American Dream hangs by a thread.

Rather than turning away and assuming someone else will pick up the pieces, there are individuals, who have been termed Neighborhood Healers, who work to pick up those pieces and they change lives and communities in the process.

And in the spirit of self reliance and self determination that dominates our great party, these Healers work without the help of any government as they are trying to renew their communities or neighborhoods. This can be in the form of a ministry that heals the fallen, or a citizen who is fed up with the lack of attention paid to a worn down neighborhood and decides to act on his or her own, at their own expense. This can be the mentor who offers guidance to a pupil who needs that one person who cares enough to look eye to eye or soul to soul and make a difference.

Robert Putnam in his books Bowling Alone and Better Together, Robert Woodson in his book The Triumphs of Joseph and William Schambra in his speeches and writings, have all touched upon the root of the American character when people in communities work together to improve lives for those around them.

In late 2008, we started working as a group that would eventually morph into what is today the Federation of Hispanic Republicans. Our early focus as an organization was civic renewal; a re-engagement of individuals in their community. All inspired by the likes of Putnam, Woodson and Schambra.

We traveled from Houston to just south of San Antonio to the city of Von Ormy where we joined with Mayor Art Martinez de Vara in a citywide cleanup, led by Republicans. Over the next few months back in Houston, we continued this sort of work. We joined with other people to find projects that needed help. In one instance, a home needed to be painted and a neighborhood church was offering the paint and supplies, they just lacked the manpower. We teamed up with another local organization and while that house was being painted, the rest of us cleared the neighboring lot and cleaned up the yard of a vacant home.

The most interesting thing to see, was after the work was done. Days, weeks, months later, the people who did the work, those who gave up a Saturday to labor, they were still beaming with pride, satisfaction and most important of all, happiness.

Neighborhood Healers are at work across the state of Texas. Most don't call themselves Healers, they just go about their work. Most only want attention to point out the problems they're working hard to remedy. If you really think on it, we all know a Healer like this.

In April, Steve Parkhurst ventured out to San Antonio's famed Outcry in the Barrio ministry. That visit was previously written about here. As was pointed out in the recap of that visit, Outcry, a faith-based organization, has an astonishingly high success rate in getting addicts off of their substance(s) of choice and back in productive lives, often right in their own communities helping others. No government, whether federal, state, county or city, can claim the kind of success rate that a ministry like Outcry can achieve. Mainly because a place like Outcry is steeped in results after an addict leaves, while governments worry about the numbers enrolled, the number cured or healed is less important.

Ministries like Outcry in the Barrio need help. And Outcry is just one of many.

This past March, we were part of a group across the state that sought to include in the party platform a resolution, whereby the Republican Party of Texas would support the creation and/or development of a Neighborhood Healers Initiative.

With this Initiative, we wanted to show support for, and encourage the recognition of such Neighborhood Healers, and we wanted to make sure Republicans across Texas (and the nation) are doing their part to assist these Healers who are putting our conservative principles into practice on a daily basis.

We felt that as part of this initiative the Republican Party of Texas should start finding, identifying, and recognizing these healers and assure that the Republican Party both locally and statewide is assisting as needed in this community renewal. Because when good people apply deeds, and not just words, to the crises in our neighborhoods, our neighborhoods are better and we all benefit.

And this isn't about spending money. This is about growing our party; it's about growing our cause. Raising awareness and encouraging people to look a little deeper into their communities won't cost one cent.

We want to challenge all the delegates at the state Republican convention to get involved when you return home. Find an individual or organization locally that is putting principles into practice, and help them. Help however you can, with time, money, sweat equity, or even with a little social media promotion.

As Deuteronomy 15:11 tells us, "For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’"

So many Neighborhood Healers have opened wide their hands, they all could use an extra set of hands.

Outcry In The Barrio, Neighborhood Healers and a San Antonio Visit

I've written something that I won't post this website for a few weeks, but I wanted to make you aware of it now. Take a look: Outcry In The Barrio, Neighborhood Healers and a San Antonio Visit.